CADRE Comments

We continue our examination of Greta Christina's list of the top ten reasons not to believe in God. In the first post we looked at her claim that history shows a pattern of natural explanations replacing supernatural ones in the explanation of events (spoiler alert: it doesn't). In the second post we looked at her claim that, because the world religions disagree about the nature of the divine, we are just making this religion stuff up. The next reason Christina offers for not believing in God is that all the arguments offered for the existence of God are "ridiculously weak".  A bold claim, and one Christina comes nowhere near substantiating. First of all, the comment I made about the fundamental flaw running through Christina's whole piece in the first post needs to be repeated: "her definition of God is so all-encompassing (at one point she says that by 'God' she includes "the soul, or metaphysical energy, or any sort of supernatural ...

Karl Popper Notice how in the comment section in part 1 and atheist asserts "it's a fact there are no Gods." If it is a fact it's not gleaned from science. So it must be made known through that old no good Philosophy that CARM atheists are always running down. If so I'd like to see their argument. Where do you suppose it is? I think it's with the rest of the imaginary fortress of facts, which is actually a house of cards. footnote numbers taken over from part 1. Not Facts but Verisimilitude: Karl Popper (1902-1994) is one of the most renewed and highly respected figures in the philosophy of science. Popper was from Vienna, of Jewish origin, maintained a youthful flirtation with Marxism, and left his native land due to the rise of Nazism in the late thirties. He is considered to be among the ranks of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century. Popper is highly respected by scientists in a way that most philosophers of science a...

In his most recent Q&A , Dr. William Lane Craig stresses the importance of distinguishing between moral ontology (the objective status of moral facts or properties) and moral epistemology (how we come to know moral facts) when deploying the moral argument for the existence of God: I’m convinced that keeping the distinction between moral epistemology and moral ontology clear is the most important task in formulating and defending a moral argument for God’s existence of the type I defend. A proponent of that argument will agree quite readily (and even insist) that we do not need to know or even believe that God exists in order to discern objective moral values or to recognize our moral duties. Affirming the ontological foundations of objective moral values and duties in God similarly says nothing about how we come to know those values and duties. The theist can be genuinely open to whatever epistemological theories his secular counterpart proposes for how we come to know objective ...

This is part of a larger framework that includes the theories of Thomas Kuhn and argues that science is a social construct. That part of it will be saved for another time. This section, although long is answering an argument that I see atheist touting all the time. They always deny it but it's unmistakably there. Section one documents that there such an attitude among atheists and gives some preliminary arguments. Section 2 shows the truly unscientific nature of the attitude. Nowhere is the arrogance of humanity more apparent than in the many tendencies to treat God as a big man in the sky and try to subject him to scientific analysis. This is a move that most thinkers of the previous century would have laughed themselves silly over. One cannot second guess the nature of the divine by insisting that God operates under rules like a biological organism? Richard Dawkins is a major purveyor of this view but Victor Stinger is even more so. Stinger, in his God the Failed H...